Multi-perspective Decision Support System for Hierarchical Bus Transportation Network Design‎: ‎Tehran Case Study

In this paper, a multi-perspective decision support system (MP-DSS)‎ ‎to design hierarchical public transportation network is developed‎. ‎Since this problem depends on different perspectives‎, ‎MP-DSS consists of two sub-systems with macro and micro sub-systems based on travel information‎, ‎land use and expert knowledge‎. ‎In the micro sub-system‎, ‎two sub-modules are developed considering origin-destination demand matrix and attractive places to travel‎. ‎In the first sub-system‎, ‎based on traffic assignment models‎, ‎the bus corridors can be extended and by the second approach‎, ‎connectivity between attractive places can be provided‎ by new bus lanes. ‎Multi-commodity flow problem and spanning tree problem are used in these two sub-modules to assign the public services to the corresponding networks‎. ‎The corridors obtained from these sub-modules are evaluated by experts board module. ‎These corridors are used to extend bus rapid transit (BRT)‎, ‎exclusive bus lanes between multiple districts and shuttle buses for trips inside of district‎. ‎A prototype of MP-DSS is developed to illustrate the results on Tehran network. ‎The most important contribution of this paper is to generalize the different mathematical models with land use and expert knowledge which substantially improves the results of network designing problem‎.